Conventional methods for communicating information to a set of anonymous peer devices distributed across a network typically include the use of mailboxes or the use of an information bulletin board. Mailboxes allow the anonymous devices to interact through the posting of requests and/or responses to the appropriate mailbox for each given information type, and the monitoring of those mailboxes that are of interest to the device. Similarly, an information bulletin board allows the devices to interact through publishing to the bulletin board and through requests and responses posted to the bulletin board. In some instances, network controllers and administrators use these methods for distributing policies to listening peer devices. These policies may relate, for example, to any part of system administration, network security, command and control, or courses of action. For example, a manager may publish, via a peer device, a new policy relating to Internet access privileges for implementation by the company's firewalls. The firewall controllers in the company's network may implement this policy on the firewalls within their control upon retrieving the policy from a mailbox or bulletin board.
Conventionally, peer devices that communicated instructions to other peer devices could send policies directly to the peers in situations where their identities are known in advance, or in the case of anonymous peers they could place a single ‘current’ policy in a mailbox or bulletin board for their peers to find. In environments where policies might change rapidly and where it takes time to read and assimilate policies, to insure timely and accurate policy digestion, it may be desirable to keep several policy versions in the mailbox or bulletin board at the same time. As a result, it may be impossible for a peer device wanting the current version of the policy to determine which policy version to implement, and when the peers are anonymous it may be impossible to know which peer to contact for this information.
Therefore, there exists a need for a system and method that facilitate the dissemination of multiple versions of policies among anonymous peer devices and the selection of a currently active version.